Night Beat (13 page)

On that night, as on so many nights before and since, I realized that it has indeed been something special to be around during a time when Bob Dylan has been one of our foremost American artists. I thought back to my youth and how Dylan’s music had helped inspire my values and also helped nurture my spirit through several seasons of difficult and exciting changes. I was not alone in these responses, of course. Dylan managed to speak to and for the best visions and boldest ideals of an entire emerging generation, and he also spoke to our sense of scary and liberating isolation: the sense that we were now living on our own, with “no direction home,” and that we would have to devise our own rules and our own integrity to make it through all the change. In the process, Dylan not only heroically defined the moment, he also invented rock & roll’s future: He staked out a voice and style that countless other budding visionaries, including Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, Sinéad O’Connor, Beck, Elliott Smith, and more than a few rap artists would later seek to emulate and make their own. And because he did this so affectingly, it became easy to take him and his work personally, to believe that he was still tied to our dreams and our hopes for pronouncements that might yet deliver us. Tom Petty’s drummer, Stan Lynch, once told me: “I saw many people who were genuinely moved by Dylan, who felt they had to make some connection with him, that this was an important thing in their life. They wanted to be near him and tell him they’re all right, because they probably feel that Bob was telling them that it was going to be all right when they
weren’t
all right, as if Bob knew they weren’t doing so well at the time.

“They forget one important thing: Bob doesn’t know them; they just know him. But that’s all right. That’s not shortsightedness on their part. That’s just the essence of what people do when you talk to them at a vulnerable time in their lives. It doesn’t matter that he was talking to them by way of a record; he was still talking to them.”

Or, as Bruce Springsteen once noted, in some remarks directed to Dylan on the occasion of Dylan’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, “When I was fifteen and I heard “Like a Rolling Stone’ for the first time, I heard a guy like I’ve never heard before or since. A guy that had the guts to take on the whole world and made me feel like I had ’em too. . . . To steal a line from one of your songs, whether you like it or not, ’You was the brother that I never had.’ ”

It’s an understandable sentiment; to some of us, the epiphanies of youth count as deeply as the bonds of family. But as Dylan himself once told an interviewer: “People come up to me on the street all the time, acting like I’m some long-lost brother—like they
know
me. Well, I’m not their brother, and I think I can prove that.”

It may be the only thing that he has left to prove—that he is not, after all, his brother’s keeper—though in a sense, it hardly matters. The truth is, Dylan is still attempting to sort out the confusion of the day in the most honest and committed way that he knows. That is probably about as much as you can ask of somebody who has already done a tremendous amount to deepen our consciousness and our time.

In 1998, as I finish these words, Bob Dylan remains what he has been for over thirty-five years: a vital American artist. He has shifted our past and opened wide our future. We should be proud to claim him as our own.

the rolling stones’ journey into fear

I
t may seem hard to fathom these days—watching Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ aged incarnations of their former terror-bringing selves—but there was a time when the Rolling Stones seemed the unmistakable apotheosis of rock & roll: superlative purveyors of blues and rhythm & blues who dramatized first the pop rebelliousness, then the moral disdain and political uncertainty, of an entire social movement. Later, when that uncertainty turned into frustration, and the frustration into malignancy, the Rolling Stones also mirrored the dissolution of their generation.

Maybe a better way of putting this is to state that the Rolling Stones said as much about the shared social condition of our lives as anyone else in rock & roll; in fact, they may have been pop’s last real unifying force. By that I mean the Stones became a focal point for rock at a critical juncture: The Beatles had disintegrated in pain, Bob Dylan had seemingly traded his world-altering iconoclasm for family security, and the late 1960s psychedelic rock movement had turned hollow, even harmful. Then: There were the Rolling Stones again, back from a fitful term of drugs and death (actually, that term wasn’t quite yet over for the band), singing songs boasting collusion in evil and revolt, touting themselves as “The World’s Greatest Rock & Roll Band,” and providing the music and performances to support either claim. Nobody since then has won such widespread assent, or seemed to define for so many what rock & roll should mean and look and feel like. This isn’t to say that other artists didn’t have as much impact on rock & roll (certainly the Sex Pistols and Nirvana—plus many rap artists—transformed rock’s meanings, and large parts of its audience as well). Nor is it to say that other artists didn’t prove better sellers than the Stones. Still, the Rolling Stones were perhaps the
last
thing that the rock & roll world at large seemed to agree on, and all the disagreements since then either amount to what one believes we’ve gained or what we’ve lost.

Which is to say that, in certain respects, the last twenty years or so haven’t really proved that favorable for the Stones—or at least for their place in that later span of history. Following the 1960s, the group hit a long, limp stride, relying on their reputation to buoy them when their music couldn’t. More important, the reference points of rock changed ineradicably: Punk bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash had stolen the moment and sought to indict the Stones as an outmoded fetish, as well as symbols of inflated privilege and decadence. The charge wasn’t far off the mark: The Rolling Stones had backed off from every notion of rebellion save an arrogant conviction in their own rank—a belief that allowed them not to flout authority so much as
own
it. The punks hit the Stones hard—alongside such songs as “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “Guns on the Roof,” the Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” sounded like an anthem of equivocation—and though the group hit back a little with 1978’s
Some Girls,
it wasn’t enough to regain their cutting edge. The group still sold, still carried the weight of myth and sensation, but that’s all that can be said of their story now for far too many years.

Still, the journey that brought the Stones to their own dissolution was rich, remarkable, and genuinely brave (though perhaps also mean and foolhardy). Along the way, the band became a measure of when rock music and its culture succeeded most and then failed bitterly; indeed, at that time, the Rolling Stones were the best definition rock & roll had of a center—a center that could not hold. In the years that followed, that center became scattered—as if hit by a shotgun blast. Other times, it seemed replaced by a void. Either way, it may be that nobody can ever define it again in quite the same way as the Rolling Stones once did, long ago, in frightened, ecstatic, and audacious times.

IN THE EARLY and mid-1960s, the Rolling Stones earned what was likely the most important designation of their career: Simply, they were a great white blues and rhythm & blues band. Unlike Elvis Presley, the Stones didn’t help reinvent or transmogrify black music. Instead, with
The Rolling Stones, Now!, Out of Our Heads, 12 x 5,
and
December’s Children,
they sought to assimilate or adopt Chicago blues and Chuck Berry-style rock & roll—which isn’t, as some detractors suggested, the same as purloining or exploiting that music. For the most part, the Rolling Stones were upwardly mobile young men, enamored with black music’s emotional artistry, though not so much the music’s emotions—at least not the deep-rooted agony and fear (and
release
from agony and fear) that permeated American blues. (For the Stones, that deepening would come later.) In the mid-1960s, the Rolling Stones came closer to stylizing their own feelings in brittle, tense, keen-edged rock & roll singles like “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadows,” “Get Off of My Cloud,” “The Last Time,” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”—the latter among the 1960s’ most defining pop songs. Not surprisingly, the emotions conveyed in these songs were those of disdain and rancor, arrogance and ennui.

My best remembrances of seeing the band—that is, except in the film
Gimme Shelter—
are from this period, during their 1965 U.S. tour, at an appearance in Portland, Oregon. I recall Brian Jones, squatting on his haunches, playing dulcimer embellishments on “Lady Jane,” then picking up a teardrop-shaped guitar, clutching it high and tight to his chest during “The Last Time,” standing insanely close to the stage’s edge, inviting more real danger than even Mick Jagger did. I remember Jagger in an off-white suit, a bright blue ruffled shirt, barefoot and messy-haired, pulled up into a mock-toreador’s stance, coaxing the audience with the shimmies of his tambourine, getting upbraided by a policeman down front who had to hold off the rushing kids, then kicking trash in the cop’s startled face, waving him off with a scornful flick of the wrist, as if to dismiss, forever, any last threats of authority. I’d never seen anything that flirted so wildly and ably with mass chaos, and I’d never seen anything so magnificent. Later, I read something by critic Jon Landau that explained that show: “Violence. The Rolling Stones are violence. Their music penetrates the raw nerve endings of their listeners and finds its way into the groove marked “release of frustration.’ Their violence has always been a surrogate for the larger violence their audience is so capable of.”

By 1966 and 1967, the Rolling Stones had come into their own. With
Aftermath, Between the Buttons,
and
Flowers,
the band made some of their most inventive music: part blues-based, part surreal pop, frequently eloquent, occasionally drug-steeped, and always best when it cut between affectations with the fleet, fiery glint of rock & roll. The band’s 1967 work,
Their Satanic Majesties Request,
was at one extreme an overblown response to the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
and the pervasive pop psychedelia of that season. In another way,
Satanic Majesties
was a work that tapped or mocked the effete creative sensibility of that period as effectively as
The Velvet Underground and Nico.
At the time—and especially in the years that followed
—Satanic Majesties
was dismissed as an ambitious mess. Today, to my ears, it plays wonderfully, and beneath its occasional concessions to that season’s notions of simple altruism, beats a dark, dark heart.

But it was with
Beggar’s Banquet
(1968) and
Let It Bleed
(1969)—albums more or less of a piece—that the Rolling Stones made their most intelligent, committed, and forcible music. These were, in large measure, records about social disorder and moral vacillation, and more than before or since, the band seemed to say something about the moods and idealism coming apart all around them. The timing couldn’t have been better. By 1968—a year in which Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot to death in Memphis; and the broken hopes of millions of people erupted in costly, long-term violence (climaxing at the Chicago Democratic National Convention, at which police brutally bludgeoned American youth)—rock & roll had become a field of hard options and opposing arguments. The Beatles seemed dazed and wary by their role as youth leaders. On one hand, they recorded two versions of “Revolution,” in which they opted in, and then out, of the notion of violent revolt; then, on the flip side, they issued “Hey Jude,” their greatest anthem of community and forbearance. By contrast, the Stones faced the contradictions of their position more directly. In “Salt of the Earth” (from
Beggar’s Banquet
), Jagger extolled the working-class masses only to admit his hopeless distance from any real involvement with such people (“When I search a faceless crowd/A swirling mass of gray and black and white/They don’t look real to me/In fact they look so strange”), and in “Street Fighting Man” (banned in several U.S. cities for fear that it might incite further political riots), the Stones admitted to both a desire for violent confrontation and a longing for equivocation (“Hey! Think the
time
is
right
for a
pa
lace rev-OH
-loo-
tion/But
where
I
live
the
game
to
play
is
com
pro
mise
SO-loo-tion”). For that matter, the Rolling Stones were asking some of the toughest questions around (“I shouted out, “Who killed the Kennedys?’ ” sang Jagger in “Sympathy for the Devil”), and they didn’t hesitate to deliver hard answers (“Well after all, it was you and me”). In addition, the group had suffered its own loss when Brian Jones left the band in June 1969, and was found dead in his swimming pool a month later.

The passion and persuasion of that music carried over to the Rolling Stones’ historic 1969 U.S. tour, but so did the risk, culminating in the Altamont debacle that left four people dead, including one black man, Meredith Hunter, stabbed to death in front of the stage by Hell’s Angels while the group played an uneasy set.

LET’S STOP the story there, because in a way, that’s where the story
does
stop. The Rolling Stones would go on to make some good-to-great work, including
Exile on Main Street
(a 1972 album of dense, brutal music that worked beyond rebellion, or more accurately, worked
against
rebellion in the sense that it cultivated dissipation);
Some Girls,
in 1978 (as R & B-informed as their early records, as prideful as
Aftermath);
and 1981’s
Tattoo You,
with the band’s last great single, “Start Me Up.” I’d even be willing to add
Dirty Work
(1986) to the list—if only because, for once, the group’s music was revolving around notions of anger, emptiness, and rejection that seemed candidly self-derived and mutually directed—plus 1995’s live album
Stripped,
because it features some of the best singing of Jagger’s career: He finally sounds like an aged blues-jazz-pop pro, as mean, witty, and weathered as latter-day Frank Sinatra. (It really makes you wish Sinatra had covered Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” or Jagger and Richards’ own “The Spider and the Fly”; like Jagger, Sinatra would have torn the songs open anew.)

But after
Exile on Main Street,
the Rolling Stones would never again make music that defined our times, that helped us or even hurt us. They would never again make music that mattered much outside the needs and contexts of their own career—and even then it’s hard to imagine that records as inconsiderable as
Goat’s Head Soup, It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll, Black and Blue,
and
Emotional Rescue
mattered even to the Stones.